Birds (Reference Analysis)
Each section of this poem is about a “bird,” referencing the metaphor derived from the short story, “The 141st.” Each bird is a person (or type of person) that I’ve written about one time or another. Bird: a person who is dying, falling, or failing from a preventable cause, yet do not stop themselves, or are not stopped by others. Section 1: Doorkeeper This section is about an unnamed character, who has only been called “the doorkeeper,” “M-3,” and “you.” They first appeared in the short story, “When the Morning Comes,” which was based off the song, “This Too Shall Pass,” by OK Go. In the story, the narrator appears to be a resident in a city, and the only other characters are their friend, who seems to have control over the city, and the doorkeeper, tasked with protecting the city. The narrator is frustrated because their friend, “you,” keeps letting the doorkeeper fail at their job, by letting in all sorts of terrible things, calamities, or natural disasters. “You” keep insisting that it will pass, but the narrator takes action, threatening to kill the doorkeeper, until finding out that the doorkeeper was their friend all along. In the poem, “Near the Rupture,” the variable names for the narrator and doorkeeper are “M-1” and “M-3,” in which the “m”s stand for “morning.” The entire setting of the story—the city and all that happens within it—is meant to be the physical manifestation of the Doorkeeper’s state of mind. The narrator compares them to people who build up walls and lock away their emotions in order to avoid pain. But the Doorkeeper is just the opposite, destroying themselves just to experience a bit of good, which the narrator claims will also pass, asking if it was all worth it. Section 2: Cub This section is about a character who exists in “Achieving Freedom,” and “Achieving Freedom II,” offshoots of a pre-existing story called “D.Gray-man,” written by Hoshino Katsura. In the poem, “Near the Rupture,” he is referred to by the variable name, “A.” When he was very young, he lived in a circus and endured abuse from the people who should have been his guardians. He was called “Red” for the color of his deformed left arm (this still stands from the original story, “D.Gray-man,” so it isn’t typically mentioned in writing pieces, at least in such a specific manner. During his time at the circus, he happened to form a bond with a tiger being kept there (Shiemi), and began to attempt to liken himself to her. He procured many scars over his time there, spanning across his body, which he compared to Shiemi’s stripes. She became a mother figure to him, as with her was one of the few safe and comfortable places for him. “Survived in a place where // All the humans were beasts // And only the beasts were // Humane.” “Nightmares in high school” refer to the Cub’s resulting post-traumatic stress disorder, which would follow him his whole life, though to a lesser extent later on, as he received more help. “Lost might” refers to his left arm, which, along with its abnormal appearance, was also paralyzed for much of his youth. The concept of performances and fake smiles mentioned in later lines connects to his later tendency to hide his struggle from others by always acting positively. The line including “clown smiles” refers to his connection to clowns; his adoptive father was a clown (they met when he traveled to the circus), and the Cub began working as his assistant in performances. He seemed to carry a metaphorical “clown mask” with him throughout his life. This much is true in the original series, DGM, as well. He is also often likened to a clown in a similar manner, even depicted to be wearing such a mask. In the series, he bears a weapon called “Crown Clown,” which includes a mask in its armor, and he is sometimes referred to as a “pierrot.” Specific written pieces are also referenced in this section. “Words are weapons // And fists” is a rearrangement of lines of the third stanza in “What It Loves.” The phrase “falling asleep while wounded,” associated with the fear of this, is a reference to a short story titled, “In Sleep.” This piece, only spanning a few paragraphs, is based on an event in a variation of Achieving Freedom, and features the Cub as the main character. Section 3: Purgatorian This section is about one of the main characters in a short story series called, “Mary’s Lamb.” The Purgatorian herself is Mary Bergère, a snobbish rich girl meant to inherit her mother’s fortune, until her early death in the first story of the series (same title). She reappears in the third story, “The Paint That Won’t Come Off,” which this section most specifically refers to. In this story, Mary is already dead, and now exists within a Chamber, or personal afterlife, designed to punish her by way of guilt. The Chamber includes her old home, where everything falls to ruin (stanza 1) except the upstairs bathroom (stanza 2), the physical representation of her leading regret. “A truly mummified tomb” refers to the comparison of Mary’s funeral to an Egyptian burial, where she was laid to rest with all her possessions. This was also directly implied in “Near the Rupture,” in line 35 where France in the 20th century is compared to Ancient Egypt, followed by an alternate phrasing of part of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” This is because the possessions buried with Mary included her servant, Agnes, the main character of the second story, “From the House on Meris Lane.” Agnes is also the “lamb” mentioned in stanza 3 of this section; her name means “lamb” as well. “Sickness of the heart” refers to Mary’s cause of death. The ending of the section refers to Mary’s self-punishment—to try to scrub away red paint from the bathroom floor until she bled. Section 4: The Author This section is about the subject section 2 is about, making the Cub and the Author the same person. However, this section is far more specific, as it refers only to a particular version of Achieving Freedom where the event written of takes place. Here, the Author is committing suicide, and leaving a note behind. It’s the exact same occurrence that the poem, “Until Tomorrow” is about. “To be human // To be real,” connects to a series of lines in the Cub’s section, “He’d long to be a person all his life // Long for the freedom that // Things // Don’t have.” The crumpled, tattered paper is crumbled and tattered due to being kept so long, taken out, written on, then discard again, but never thrown away, showing the subject’s long-standing plan to commit suicide, yet also their hesitation. The beginning of the next stanza, with mentions of a soldier refers almost directly to a key part and theories of “D.Gray-man,” the original where the Cub/Author’s parallel (Allen Walker) came from. In this story, Allen actually is a soldier, and he isn’t suicidal in such a straightforward way. It’s shown that his main reason to live is for the sake of others, to the point that he would destroy his body or withstand massive amounts of pain just to keep fighting to protect them. It’s also said that his ultimate goal is just to die in a way that would make his adoptive father proud. Allen in Achieving Freedom has similar tendencies, but a smaller or no proper outlet for them. “A paper that was more // Numbers than // Words,” refers back to the concept of the Author’s suicide note being covered in crossed-out dates, showing his hesitation and long-standing plan to take his life. The reason they’re called the “Author” is simply due to what they did just before dying. Also, to match “Until Tomorrow,” where the main character is not given a gender, they/them pronouns are used here, as opposed to the he/him pronouns in the Cub’s section. Section 5: Mother This section is about a character with no clear name, aside from “141B.” Originally, she’d been the narrator of the short story, “The Cleanwater Room,” where she worked in a facility of the same name (it was here she was called 141B). After an unknown time passed, she escaped and settled down in the northern village, Nadinwold, where she had a daughter named Maudie, who became a character in the story, “Static and Mist,” along with her husband, Lannie Fulton. The whole family is associated with the aspect of the Nadinwold Tragedy involving birds falling from the sky. 141B was also the narrator of the short story, “The 141st,” which an epilogue of sorts for “Static and Mist.” “Perhaps it was a war” and “a war between birds and water” are direct quotes from “The 141st,” though in this section, “birds” in here is altered to “us,” as the poem in its entirety is about these birds. “Dead councilmen too thirsty to drink” refers to some of the council members in both Nadinwold and Maraubury, but specifically Matt Barrett, who died at the end of “Static and Mist” at the very rim of the Well from being crushed by a fallen beam. (As energy is translated into Wellwater, him being “too thirsty to drink” means he has no energy at all.) If a glass of Wellwater is “too full,” it contains more energy than the environment can spare. “Coat pocket hidden objects” refers to a bottle of Wellwater that Lannie kept in secret in case of an emergency. He did use it in an emergency in the end, but by that time it was too late anyway. “Children unborn,” refers to Lannie and Maudie’s daughter, who died due to the energy “drought” leading up to the Nadinwold Tragedy. “Fallen creatures” refers to the birds, but also, in a wider stretch, the people of the area. The last two stanzas are directly about the events of the Nadinwold Tragedy. The “feast” refers to the riots, where people consumed more Wellwater at one time than ever before. “Open eyes” is one of the terms the 141st used to describe the aftermath of the riots. The people “counting dead” were the agents of DEHA (Department of Elven-Human Affairs). The one specifically mentioned in “The 141st” was Stephen Schuttmann, one of the characters of “Static and Mist.” Section 6: Shipwreck “Shipwreck” is a metaphor used throughout multiple pieces of writing, mostly poetry. It refers to a type of person, one who is inevitably dying/ failing/ falling, but does so in grace. It originated from the performance poem, “Hourglass,” and later appeared in its sequel, “Magnitude.” The metaphor is used almost interchangeably with “sixth-magnitude stars,” which are referred to throughout this section. The first line is somewhat based on the rhyme and wording of the first line in Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.” The last line of the first stanza, “No one seems to see the star die,” is the nearly-exact quote of “no one saw the star die,” from the poem, “Even After.” The second stanza refers to parts of “Hourglass.” The first is from, “So we forget to thank the pierrot // Until he’s done entertaining us with tunes and resumes to draw with knives upon our necks, // ‘Shipwreck,’ he labels...” The sand connects to several parts of the poem in which it was repeatedly mentioned. The third stanza’s first line is a quote from an older performance, “We Are the World,” which was written based on certain characters and concepts from the story, “Fullmetal Alchemist,” by Hiromu Arakawa. The short story, “Graveyard,” also refers to this poem. “A million tiny lights // Like graves // In the sky,” refers to the short story, “In the Beech Forest.” “A sea of galactic depth” refers to the lines, “...for you likely know // How deep the sea in the sky does go,” from “Magnitude.” The “moment of sunken ships and song” and “departure we expect,” refers to the concept explored in “Magnitude” and other pieces, the song of departure. In “Magnitude,” a part of a shipwreck’s sinking in grace was the song itself, the one last breath that says they won’t die without meaning. The concept was based on a part of the series, “No.6,” by Asano Atsuko, when one of the characters sang to a group of people he knew were about to die; he’d also sing to dogs that were dying so as to ease the pain (foreshadowing for the song he sang for the people). He sang for the person he loved as well, when that person supposedly died or was dying. Those people, in this case, could be considered “shipwrecks,” but in the metaphor, a shipwreck will usually sing for themselves.